"Emotions Are In Our Power"

People often ask what I do in my rhetoric classes. Well, this would be one of my seminar papers from April 2011. Although it is probably not perfect, it was one of my favorite papers I ever wrote. 

 

“The entire theory of emotion can be summed up in a single point:
that they are all in our power” ~Cicero

Healing Emotions: Editing Our Internal Rhetorics

Neurological imbalances from something ‘minor’ such as public speaking anxiety to more ‘major’ debilitating disorders such as depression and addictions have oft been defined as “modern sicknesses” that we deal with. Treatment options often include behavior modification therapy, counseling services, drug therapy, and other surgical treatments. Typically, the tendency is to focus on and treat the biological factor; what chemical will correct what imbalance in the brain? However, I feel like both the cause and solution for neurological imbalances can more often be located in the world of rhetoric and the studies of emotions. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus specifically on the neurological imbalances in phobias and addictions. At the risk of oversimplification I shall attempt a simple set of proofs: Neurological imbalances are emotionally based. Our emotions are used to create our internal rhetorics. Our internal rhetorics can be edited through dialectical exchanges. This simplified outline raises a host of complex questions, many too extensive to be answered in the limited confines of this discussion. However, I would like to briefly examine the points discussed in that equation: 1) The idea that neurological imbalances are emotionally based; 2) The idea that we create internal rhetorics through our emotions; 3) The idea that we can edit our internal rhetorics through dialectical experience.
 
Our Imbalances are Emotionally Based
    What are our emotions? Where are they located? How do they work? While centuries of debate has not yet reached a conclusive consensus on these questions, there has been sufficient dialogue and discussion that it is impossible to enter the discussion without at least detailing which doorway of reasoning one is coming in through. The one I will be using in this paper is ultimately that of the Peripatetics—emotions are good, when in balance—and are located not in the mind as “activities of the mind’s judging faculty” (Cicero xii)—as the Stoics argued—and not in the body—as the Erotics argued—but in the interplay between the body and mind.

 However, the philosophers I feel who best first described how emotions become habits or behaviors were the Stoics, specifically Cicero. Although their descriptions of emotions was written in order to devalue emotions—a point I will discuss later—the Stoics gave an invaluable description of the corollary states of the body and the mind. Cicero argues at length that infirmities to the mind are equivalent to sicknesses of the body: “Just as sicknesses and infirmities of the body come into being when the blood is impure or when there is an excess of phlegm or bile, so also the confusion of crooked opinions and the conflict of one with another robs the mind of health and disturbs it with sicknesses” (Cicero 47). In their opposition to emotion, the Stoics described in detail how an ill-used emotion can lead to a bad habit.

When a person has conceited a desire for money, and when there has been no immediate application of reason –the Socratic medicine, as it were, which might have cured that desire—then the evil works its way into the veins, and settles in the vital organs, and come to be a sickness and an infirmity. Once it has become habitual, the sickness cannot be removed, and its name is ‘greed,’ it is the same with the other sicknesses, such as desire for glory or liking for women, which arise in the same way (Cicero 48). However, while this is true of bad habits, it can also be true of good habits. Cicero talked about how emotions unchecked leads to habits. This is true, but habits checked leads to control of emotions.

If One Gets Rid of the Emotions, Does One Get Rid of the Imbalances?
One of the key ideas I will be arguing against in this paper is Cicero’s notion of the ideal state of mental health: one without pesky emotions. Cicero felt that the primary reason for sickness in the human mind was presence of emotions. Hence, the best way to remove sickness was to remove the emotions. “But the specific and more reliable cure is when you teach that the emotions are wrong in and of themselves and have nothing either natural or necessary about them” (Cicero 61). The problem is that would sort of be like removing blood from the human body when it’s infected; there would be no human left afterwards. Simply “not having emotions” is not something our minds are equipped to do. As Aristotle pointed out, “the emotions are intermediate between our characteristically human rationality and our more plantlike functions such as digestion and growth” (Cicero xvii). We are not simply plants; we are human beings who breathe, live, love, laugh, cry, and live through a plethora of emotions that I would argue we wouldn’t be able to lose without losing some quality of life.

While getting rid of pesky emotions altogether is sometimes an attractive proposal, it’s not the most practical. Addictions are a good example of how trying to remove oneself from emotion is not necessarily successful. Cicero might suggest that, as a mental illness, addictions come from access of emotions and the solution simply is to withdraw from emotions. However, that ignores a basic tenant of addictions: people with addictions are typically described as attempting to numb some sort of emotion, to withdraw to a state where they can be in better control. In addition, people with addictions are frequently seeking to bring balance to a perceived inner imbalance. For example, someone with bulimia might be trying to fill a hole inside, a hole where sweetness is missing. Someone with anorexia may be trying to prove that he or she is a ‘good person” by creating strongly polarized behaviors to identify her as good or bad. Someone who cuts often is trying to make their outside appearance match the ugly they feel inside. Someone with drinking may be trying to numb the extra pain to a manageable level, or find a sense of a high “everything is right” feeling that they can’t find elsewhere in their life. Someone who is OCD might be trying to exert order into a life they feel they otherwise cannot control.
The premise I am drawing from is in line with Jack Katz’s, “Emotions, which have so often been treated as opposed to thinking, are paradoxically self-reflective actions and experiences…Through our emotions, we reach back sensually to grasp the tacit, embodied foundations of ourselves” (Katz 7). Emotions are not, as Cicero argued, the inhibitors of our judging capacities. Rather, they embody our ability to judge. We are human beings, and our ability to reason is based on the fact that we have more complex emotions with which to judge. We use our emotions as judgments to write our “emotional strategies for engaging with the world” (Solomon 3).

If emotions are, as Aristotle argued, located in the interplay between mind and body, then our mind creates a series of strategies or beliefs, which could be referred to as internal rhetoric. The problem that comes in is when our emotions become unbalanced, and we write our internal rhetorics to reflect that imbalance, hence mis-writing the behaviors that follow the directions our bodies in some ways “read” from our internal rhetorics. Phobias are good examples of this principle. They are often learned reactions to an emotionally charged moment that influence our behavior going forward, such as learning to be terrified of spiders because another you respect is terrified of emotions, or from being startled by a crawling sensation. That learned reaction then becomes part of the individual’s experience, or internal rhetoric. Hence, the conclusion that can be seen is one that will be made throughout the paper: individuals experience life through their emotions, write those emotions into “strategies” or internal rhetoric, and then follow through with behaviors that mirror those internal rhetorics.

Internal Rhetoric: Created Through our Experience
Jean Niencamp coined the term internal rhetoric to refer to Kenneth Burke’s terministric screen, or, “the rhetorical nature of internal thought…Internal rhetoric’ is thus a lens through which to study mental activity rather than a reference to a particular kind of activity” (Niencamp ix). Rather than simply refer to it as the screen, however, for the purpose of this paper I am defining internal rhetoric as our inner set of core beliefs and values. “I am good at sports” or “if I go and try hard enough, I can solve this math problem” or “snakes will kill me” or “I cannot be rich because my parents were not rich” or “I am not good at math because people laughed at me when I was in 2nd grade and failed a problem in front of everyone.” Each of us has a set of beliefs and sets of dialogue that in many ways pre-determine our reactions to the world around us, sets of beliefs that have been written through our emotional engagements with the world. Those beliefs further influence all of our actions. For example, I have been encouraged through the accolades of friends and family that my piano skills are amazing. I have similarly been encouraged that my handwriting is atrocious. Therefore, on my inner walls, I identify as being a pretty decent pianist, but terrible at handwriting. In a public situation, I would be much happier to play piano for a group than I would be to write on the whiteboard. I would be embarrassed if I messed up on piano, since I expect myself to be good at it, but I would suffer very little embarrassment if I were to write sloppishly on the board, since it’s something I already know that I am bad at and feel no anxiety to perform well over.

Our internal rhetoric covers more than what we think we are good or aren’t good. It also includes our deep beliefs about life. I believe that this is predominantly a good world with good people who mess up a lot. My brother believes this is predominantly a bad world with bad people who occasionally get it right. I believe that if I push myself, I will feel accomplished with what I have done. My brother feels that if he pushes himself, he will just feel tired. Our internal rhetoric also includes our strategies for dealing with the world. If someone yells at me, I feel that person therefore probably is having a bad day and the best strategy is for me to walk away. Were someone to yell at my brother, he would probably assume that person had some serious grievance with him and he would take the strategy of becoming angry in response and confronting that person. Perceptions of levels of perfectionism, control, and so on—all the inner beliefs and values we have make up the writing on our internal walls, our internal rhetoric.

As we are in situations, we use our internal rhetorics to understand how to negotiate them. Sometimes we will have to go through multiple sets of possible responses before finding one that works. A child trying to persuade a parent is a good example of this, trying, perhaps, wheedling, coaxing, threating, or yelling at terms in effort to reach a goal. As some approaches work, or as some beliefs are affirmed, we edit the walls of our internal rhetoric accordingly. We are constantly “editing” the walls of our experience. Internal rhetorics include long-term and short-term beliefs and strategies. Some parts of our internal rhetoric become so core that they consistently stay the same. There are other parts that are fluid. For example, my belief that the world is a good place is a fairly core, permeating belief. However, a belief that no one working at the DMV would ever be pleasant to speak to could quickly be changed by one encounter with one nice receptionist who would force me to invalidate that assumption. The belief that my handwriting is terrible could change were I to take a class, perhaps, and significantly improve it. The fluid parts of our walls are not such an issue. The challenges are the internal core pieces that become “stuck” in the damning “habits” Cicero refers to.

Cicero felt that any emotion we had, when repeated, could become a habit. For example, reacting with anger to someone on one occasion could prove successful to that person’s goal. Hence, that emotion of anger would be validated as useful to that person (although perhaps not to others around that person), and that person would, over a period of time, develop the damning habit of being an angry person. That belief or strategy would then be written on the walls of our internal rhetoric or experience, burned into our being as core rhetoric through repetition.

Internal rhetorics are not completely written by nurture; there are experiences, and then there are individual natures that interact with those experiences. Some people may be pre-disposed by nature or by circumstance to one set of internal rhetoric or another, writing completely different internal rhetorics in the same situation. For example, I might share the experience of the dark room with shadows with a brother, and I while I would be terrified, he might just shrug. Cicero talked about this as “proclivities,” where,

Some people are more prone than others to contract certain sicknesses… such as certain people we say ‘suffer from sinus; or ‘suffer from colic; meaning not that they are suffering from it now but that they often do. In the same way, some people are more prone to fear and others to other emotions. ….there is a difference between suffering from anxiety and feeling anxious…A tendency toward the bad should be called a ‘proclivity’ to suggest falling into error (Cicero 48).

Although Cicero was referring to these tendencies as negative, they can also be positive. Just as someone could be an ‘anxious’ person, so could someone be stoic or happy. We all have tendencies that can be developed in different ways just as we all have different muscle capacities. It might not be as easy for me as it would be for my brother to make those ripping biceps. All of us can, though, control those internal rhetorics, and, I will later argue, we have the ethical responsibility to do so. This raises the question: if we gain sets of beliefs based on our experiences and our reactions to our experiences, and if we can change those rhetorics based on our initiatives to some sort of ideal state, what would the ideal internal rhetoric be?

What is the Ideal Internal Rhetoric?
This is a rather complex question. As referenced earlier, Cicero’s method of ideal balance was very simple: get rid of emotions altogether. However, simply “not having emotions” is not something our minds are equipped to do. Our internal rhetoric needs emotions in order to be written and followed. For present, I will simply say that I fall in with the Peripatetics, the school of thought Aristotle established, who felt that every mind should experience lots of types of emotions but should “set a ‘limit’ beyond which one should not proceed” (53). Every emotion has value, and the ability not to have an emotion, as Robert C. Solomon would say, “is a vice” just as much as feeling too much of an emotion (Solomon 13). There needs to be an ideal balance of emotions. If we must have emotions to be balanced, the question this raises is, again, what is the ideal set of emotions?

The problem is that there is no perfect set. That perfect set could alter significantly depending on an individual’s gender, age, social standing, religion, family, situation, location, and a myriad of other factors. Two individuals in one room may have completely different appropriate beliefs and values for their circumstance. A CEO of a company sitting with a contractor for a building bid would need to have completely different beliefs about what each was or wasn’t good at in order for there to be balance in their negotiations. Hence, there is not necessarily one “ideal slate” that everyone should come back to. The ideal is to have the balance of emotions that enables you to live the most productive life that you can live. Depending on the society and individual circumstances of each individual, that ideal balance may differ. The important thing is to do the internal evaluation necessary to write the internal rhetoric that enables each individual to “live the good life,” whatever that “good life” may be. How then, can any individual “edit” his or her internal rhetoric? Is it possible?

Negotiating that ideal rhetoric is a very dialectic process, involving interacting with different models and individuals. We edit our internal rhetorics through third-party interactions and their external rhetorics, ultimately selecting our internal rhetorics through the process of emotionally identifying and disidentifying with others in, as Daniel M. Gross argued, the process of learning to see the “available means of persuasion,” or learning to see what can be otherwise (Gross 13). The way we come to understand individual problems and deal with them is through rhetoric, using external rhetoric to edit our internal rhetoric. As Niencamp argues, we all have our own series of internal thoughts and emotions, but it is through interacting with other “rhetorics” that we edit our own, in a term that I will refer to as “third-party rhetoric.”


Third-party Rhetoric: Can We ‘Edit’ Our Internal Rhetoric?
    Third party rhetoric can come in many forms; friends, family, literature, music, self-journaling—there are many forms of it. Any set of beliefs or emotions, whether contained within another individual or within a piece of art, makes up a separate third-party rhetoric. While we can never completely understand another third party’s rhetoric, by attempting to imaginatively identify with parts of that rhetoric, we complicate our understandings and perceptions and have to resolve where they conflict with our own. This process of resolving re-aligns our thinking and helps us learn to see what can be otherwise. In essence, Aristotle taught that we need to learn the available means of persuasion for persuading others, but we are also learning the available means of persuasion for persuading ourselves.

The process of learning to see what can be otherwise is the process of identification; we have to imagine what could be different before we can accept a different set of thinking. We balance complex emotions by observing particular models and identifying with them or disidentifying with them. When a child skins his or her knee, he looks to the parent to understand how to react to the situation. If someone he admires tells him to man up, he will do so, because he wants to identify with that person. The principle of disidentification is similar. A teenage girl who comes to school and wants to identify with a group of girls will copy those emotions, perhaps learning to dislike the things that group dislikes or like the same things. The process of identifying or disidentifying with someone is trying to “read” their internal rhetoric, and in that process individuals inevitably edit their own.

Literature, music, film, and similar sources function similarly as third-party rhetorics. Each piece contains a certain set of beliefs from the creator that the person experiencing them will end up juxtaposing against that viewer’s individual emotions. The views could simplify or complicate that individual’s experience, but there will always be a change. For example, when I first saw a film on the story of Job, I was forced to re-examine my understanding of what should and should not make me angry. I watched what happened to Job and I expected that he should be angry. When he chose not to be angry, it surprised me. Up until that moment I had identified my internal rhetoric with that of the Job. From what I understood, he had every right to be angry. From my internal rhetoric, the script was matching. But, Job chose not to be angry. He chose to praise God instead. That blew my mind. And in expanding my viewpoint to try and understand his, it changed my internal rhetoric. From that point on, I no longer had the “someone has wronged me, I shall be angry” equation. I had to consider what could be otherwise. Perhaps I could choose not to be angry. My internal rhetoric might not be right.
When we try to identify with other situations, we can learn other ways of thinking we hadn’t thought of. Most of us are so convinced in the authority of our own internal thoughts that changing them rarely happens on our own; most of us require a third-party rhetoric to help us edit our understanding. The process of experiencing other third-party rhetorics through dialectical exchange and editing our internal rhetorics is one we all participate in every day. For most people, it becomes a natural process as they go through life and education, finding their stereotypes and understandings complicated by those they meet. They learn new strategies for dealing with emotions and situations and develop balanced behaviors accordingly.

However, not everyone acquires this process naturally, which is where those who do have extra responsibility. Whether through limits in their social experience or their nature, some people do not naturally experience third-party rhetoric. Not all are exposed to great literature or examples of people who can jog their internal rhetoric to learn what could be otherwise. That is where the responsibility of a rhetorician comes in. We have the responsibility, as trained rhetors, to help those around us in particular, to help others learn to engage in what could be otherwise. That doesn’t mean we are little doctors who need to run around prescribing wonder medicine, but it does mean that in situations, perhaps a volatile work or home situation where someone is angry, or where someone is hurt, we have a particular responsibility to remember that the job is not to force someone to change their behavior, but let them see what can be otherwise.

This approach is particularly useful when applied to addictions. Addictions fall neatly into what Cicero referred to as imbalances of the mind. Addictions can be called coping mechanisms or escapisms, but all they really are is someone trying to work through something they don’t understand. They are using the substances or behaviors they have selected as a third-party, something to use to control their emotions when they can’t understand how else to balance them. The problem with a substance such as alcohol or a OCD-type behavior is that they don’t contain internal rhetorics; an individual may go back to those substances over and over again, but those substances will not teach the individual how to edit his or her internal rhetoric to heal the emotional wounds inside. Third-party dialectic helps put the pieces together to help people suffering from addictions learn what should be otherwise.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy: Third-Party Rhetoric for Healing
    As illustration of the power of third-party rhetoric for editing our internal rhetorics, I would like to briefly look at dialectical behavior therapy. As described by Dr. Lineman, “Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a derivative of cognitive behavior therapy, helps patients identify thoughts, beliefs and assumptions that make their lives challenging and then learn different ways of thinking and reacting” (Times). DBT is a brilliant example of how rhetoric can be used for a type of illness that is otherwise typically treated chemically: borderline personality disorder. Dialectical behavior therapy draws from the principles Wayne C. Booth describes of building a shared metaphor through listening rhetoric (Booth 83). Through actively listening, and describing the words back to the patient, the therapist uses words to help people negotiate their tangled personal and emotional lives to build healthy relationships inside the minds, where, as Cicero describes, our minds have potential to be as healthy as our bodies.

    Dr. Lineman explains that borderline personality disorder is really just a more severe form of what many of us already experience to one degree or another: a thin emotional skin. People with borderline personality disorder have an over-reactive amygdala—the part of the brain that experiences emotions—while the part of the brain that reins in emotions is underactive. The process of DBT is similar to teaching a patient with new legs to walk—it’s a process of helping someone actively think through why they feel certain ways, why they respond to certain situations, and suggesting different ways to both see and approach certain situations. It’s a process that many of us naturally go through as children (though, like walking, we may forget it a bit as we get older and less flexible). She says, “You problem is you don’t know how to regulate yourself, and I can teach you how” (Times.)

    An individual going through treatment may go through a case scenario or, “dialectical dilemma” (Miller 3). The individual would then go through the manual process of what many of us already do naturally. The therapist will put the individual in a situation that would normally make the person anxious.

“Okay, you will be going into a room full of people. How do you feel?”
“Terrified.”
“Okay, why do you feel that way? Has anything in the past happened to make you feel that way?”
“Last week I went to my friend’s house and there was a party. When I walked in everyone laughed at me.
“Okay, why would they laugh at you?”
“I don’t know. Probably because I looked funny.”
“Is it possible that there was just laughing happening in the room and you assumed you were being laughed at?”
“Maybe. But what if they were laughing at me?”
“Okay, let’s look at it that way. If they were laughing at you, how can that hurt you? What will the danger be?”

While that example is stilted from a prompt book, it shows the point of an external rhetoric: the individual had identified the laughter as directed at him, and was responding with that appropriate emotional reaction, anger and fear, which led that individual to become afraid and not able to remain in the room. The patient, however, was not able to recognize his own internal rhetoric. He could not see the links between his behavior and his beliefs. So, the therapist helped the patient talk through “what could be otherwise” or other possibilities for emotionally understanding the process. In this example, included, would be both recognizing what could be otherwise—either a) the situation or b) the response. This process empowers the patient to examine very minutely his internal rhetoric and re-write both his emotional beliefs about the situation and his potential actions in the situation.
DBT functions, then, as a third-party rhetoric for helping edit individual experience. DBT is fascinating because in so many ways, it’s what our minds are already equipped to do: deal with and negotiate our experience. However, by being aware of how DBT works, it can help anyone in turn recognize the process by which he or she individually deals with things and find the spots where maybe we ourselves in turn could do with a little empowering and re-thinking of our situations. In some ways, it could be referred to as the “reflection” component Robert C. Solomon referred to, “Our emotions are already infected by reflection and self-consciousness. It is only a question of how crude or articulate are the concepts that make up our emotional judgments and with which we identify and describe them…And this reflection and self-consciousness will be definitive of those emotions” (227). What DBT does is help re-build the internal rhetoric by seeing what can be otherwise. It helps us identify what our internal rhetoric says and heal cracks and schisms by re-writing any writing on our inner walls that is not conducive to us living “the good life.”

Ethical Responsibility of Emotions: To Control Them
While important for helping someone with an addiction or serious imbalance, such as Cicero described, being able to consider and evaluate our emotional responses and consider what can be otherwise are valuable skills for all of us to learn. There is a role for third-party rhetoric in everyone’s life. In today’s fragmented culture seamed with many emotional imbalances, from many causes, the issue of personal responsibility is fairly controversial. For example, if an individual is abused and has broken understanding, is the individual really responsible for their understanding? How much responsibility do we have over our emotions when we didn’t control the situations that prompted those emotions? Having worked over and over again with individuals who have reacted differently to very traumatic events, including sexual abuse, physical abuse, severe personal losses, and addictions, I have come to very firmly belief the answer is yes. With the Stoics, I believe that we have been endowed with the ability to reason. And because of that ability to reason, we have the ability to change and determine our internal rhetorics. Our emotions are in many ways in our control. It would be impossible, I think, to overgeneralize and say all emotions are in our control and everyone has the capacity to control his or her emotions. However, most of us, I think, have more control than we realize or give ourselves credit for.

Imbalances in the emotions are written into our internal rhetoric. They then show up in our behaviors. Our behaviors are useful for focusing us into where our emotions are imbalanced. If I am yelling at a family member who didn’t do anything to me, that should be a cue for me to self-reflect and realize who else I was angry at. If an individual were to start stress eating or were becoming paralyzed with fear of speaking to someone, an emotion is imbalanced somewhere. That imbalance can then be traced back to a place in the internal rhetoric where that emotion became a learned reaction. As individuals, we then have the opportunity or responsibility to edit those beliefs when they are brought to our attention. Although this is certainly not a perfect system, it’s a system of self-reflection and identification that we go through all the time. And it is hoped that by being self-aware of this system, we can ultimately have better control over our emotions and reactions. Additionally, we can understand how to help others be aware of their own rhetorics and help those who struggle work through their internal rhetorics. As Cicero said, “The entire theory of emotion can be summed up in a single point: that they are all in our power.”

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